Lips for GMail

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I was watching the other day our good men Steve Jobs doing a demo of NeXT back in 1990 and marveled at the “lips” service which he uses (around 1m50s) to reply through a voice message to an email. I thought, what the heck, it’s 2010 and we still don’t have this?!? And they had it back in 1990! Needless to say I was puzzled. Next step was I searched the web a bit to find the solutions out there that allowed me to integrate something like this in GMail. The ones I found were hum.. not that good. So I build this simple GMail gadget using the HTML5 Speech attribute. If you don’t know how it works it’s basically a speech-to-text input box.

To use it you’ll need one of the latest versions of the Google Chrome browser. To install first go to GMail Settings -> Labs  and enable ‘Add any gadget by URL’. Then go to Settings -> Gadgets and add the gadget url:

http://tech.morgadinho.org/codebits2010/lips.xml

You should then see it installed, something like this:

It currently uses a script on one of my servers to deliver the e-mails since I couldn’t find a way of telling GMail itself to do it (if you do let me know). But ideally what I wanted is to able to reply to a message via this feature all from within GMail and using speech-to-text. Now Google please implement it right and make it beautiful :-)

You can find the code on github:

https://github.com/nunomorgadinho/lips4gmail

And here’s the demo:

Here’s the video I mentioned of our dear Steve:

Open Day Lx Factory

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Today is an “open day” at the Lx Factory, the place where our co-working space is located. Everyone will have the office open for visiting, surprises and a party that will last through the night. Overall a good opportunity to come and meet some of entrepreneurs that are here, there isn’t a single office in a radius of 1 km that isn’t relatively new :)

http://www.lxfactory.com

GMail Sent Mail in Inbox

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For quite some time now I’ve been getting my sent messages through GMail in my inbox for no apparent reason. Today I finally decided to take the time to look it up and found that the problem was I had a filter saying “don’t file messages from my address as spam”. As soon as I removed it the problem was gone.

iPhone 3G slow with iOS 4.1

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If you have a jailbroken iPhone 3G that is sluggish after updating to iOS 4.1 you can try disabling the backgrounds. Because that isn’t configurable you have to hack your way in, here’s how:

0) install ericas utilities, vi and OpenSSH using Cydia
1) SSH in as root@youriphoneip (check your IP via Settings->Networking; use the default password “alpine”)
2) Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app
3) Convert the plist we need from binary to xml so you can edit it in a text editor:

plutil -convert xml1 N82AP.plist
4) Edit N82AP.plist file, and change this line:

<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key>
<true/>

to this:

<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key>
<false/>

5) Save the file, respring (maybe reboot).

Hope it helps.

References:

http://thebigboss.org/2010/07/01/3g-on-40-slow

Viral Things Travel Fast

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Two funny things happened this past days..

Rob Hawkes did an HTML5 version of the Google bouncy balls logo and got tremendous amount of buzz, traffic to his website, massive increase in his Twitter followers and coverage by some media giants like CNN.

Succeeding the launch of Google Instant on Wednesday, Feross Aboukhadijeh did YouTube Instant , a site that lets you search across YouTube in real-time. Needless to say he also got an tremendous amount of buzz but the funny thing is he also got a job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley over Twitter.

Ah, isn’t the Internet great?